JB's Warehouse & Curio Emporium

Add "participating in a panel discussion" next to "getting engaged" and "eating a grapefruit without grimacing" to the list of things I've done for the first time this year. Each of the participants was given a question to discuss for five minutes at the start of the session, before the audience asked questions. Mine was "What lessons from the 1970s have been lost?" After making a disclaimer about my personal experience of the city during that decade (restricted to tagging along with my Dad along Queen West), I launched into the following... Among the lessons we should revisit are appreciating architectural styles which fall out of public favour, which aggravates the spectre of doom looming over modernist buildings we’ve discussed in this series; and mobilizing greater public support for threatened sites. Outside of heritage activists and some community groups, think of the preservation campaigns you hear about most in the media—it’s ...

This summer, I had the opportunity to be interviewed for an online bonus feature for Murdoch Mysteries. After quickly slipping back in time to tour the show’s sets, the camera rolled. Here’s the result – I show up around the 1:55 mark to discuss the state of automobiles in Toronto during the early Edwardian era. Between this, giving a talk to a local historical society a few weeks ago, and leading a heritage walking tour this summer, my confidence in my public speaking ability has skyrocketed. It’s a sideline worthy of further exploration as a sideline to my freelance activities. Fingers crossed that I can tap into more opportunities like these.